The Common Enemy

Published in the US in the Parade magazine on February 7,
1988, and in the SU in the Ogonyok magazine (with some
censorship) on March 12, 1988.
It was subsequently reprinted in The Congressional
Record, won the Olive Branch Award of New York University
in 1989, and was widely discussed in both countries.
It is also reprinted in Carl Sagan's posthumous collection
Billions and Billions, Ballantine Books, New York,
1997.

If you are daunted by the length of the text and wonder whether
to spend the time to read it, consider these representative
excerpts first:

We are at risk. [...]
What will it take to free us from the trap we have set
for ourselves?

A good start is to examine the historical facts as they
might be viewed by the other side.

The US, founded on principles of freedom and liberty,
was the last major nation to end chattel slavery;
many of its founding fathers -- G. Washington and
T. Jefferson among them -- were slave owners;
and racism was legally protected for a century after the
slaves were freed.

[The Reagan Administration] mined Nicaraguan harbors and
subsequently fled from the jurisdiction of the World Court...

We are fallible, even leaders.

Habitual enmity is corrupting and self-sustaining.

The challenge then is not in selective glorification of the
past, or in defending national icons, but in devising a
path that will carry us through a time of great mutual peril.

Is it possible that we -- we Americans,
we Soviets, we humans -- are at last
coming to our senses and beginning to work together on
behalf of the species and the planet?

Nothing is promised. History has placed this burden on
our shoulders. It is up to us to build a future worthy of
our children and grandchildren.

The Common Enemy

If only, said the American President [Reagan] to the Soviet General
Secretary [Gorbachev], extraterrestrials were about to invade --
then our two countries could unite against the common enemy.
Indeed, there are many instances when deadly adversaries, at
one another's throats for generations, put their differences
aside to confront a still more urgent threat:
the Greek city states against the Persians;
the Russians and the Polovtsys (who once had sacked Kiev) against
the Mongols;
or, for that matter, the Americans and the Soviets against the Nazis.

An alien invasion is, of course, unlikely. But there is
a common enemy -- in fact, a range of common enemies, some of
unprecedented menace, each unique to our time. They derive from
our growing technological powers and from our reluctance to
forgo perceived short-term advantages for the longer-term
well-being of our species.

The innocent act of burning coal and other fossil fuels increases
the carbon dioxide greenhouse effect and raises the temperature
of the Earth, so that in less than a century, according to
some projections, the American Midwest and the Soviet Ukraine --
current breadbaskets of the world -- may be converted into
something approaching scrub deserts.
Inert, apparently harmless gases used in refrigeration deplete
the protective ozone layer; they increase the amount of deadly
ultraviolet radiation from the Sun that reaches the surface of
the Earth, destroying vast numbers of unprotected
microorganisms that lie at the base of a poorly understood
food chain -- at the top of which precariously teeter we.
American industrial pollution destroys forests in Canada.
A Soviet nuclear reactor accident endangers the ancient culture
of Lapland.
Raging epidemic disease spreads worldwide, accelerated by modern
transportation technology.
And inevitably there will be other perils that with our usual
bumbling, short-term focus, we have not yet even discovered.

The nuclear arms race, jointly pioneered by the United States
and the Soviet Union, has now booby-trapped the planet with
some 60,000 nuclear weapons -- far more than enough to obliterate
both nations, to jeopardize the global civilization, and perhaps
even to end the million-year-long human experiment.
Despite indignant protestations of peaceable intent and solemn
treaty obligations to reverse the nuclear arms race, the
United States and the Soviet Union together still somehow
manage to build enough new nuclear weapons each year to destroy
every sizable city on the planet.
When asked for justification, each earnestly points to the other.
In the wake of the Challenger space shuttle and
Chernobyl nuclear power plant disasters, we are reminded that
catastrophic failures in high technology can occur despite our
best efforts.
In the century of Hitler, we recognize that madmen can achieve
absolute control over modern industrial states.
It is only a matter of time until there occurs some unanticipated
subtle error in the machinery of mass destruction, or some
critical communications failure, or some emotional crisis in an
already burdened national leader.
Overall, the human species spends almost $1 trillion a year,
most of it by the United States and the Soviet Union, in
preparation for intimidation and war.
Perhaps, in retrospect, there would be little motivation even
for malevolent extraterrestrials to attack the Earth; perhaps,
after a preliminary survey, they might decide it is more
expedient just to be patient for a little while and wait for us
to self-destruct.

We are at risk. We do not need alien invaders. We have all by
ourselves generated sufficient dangers. But they are unseen
dangers, seemingly far removed from everyday life, requiring
careful thought to understand, and involving transparent gases,
invisible radiation, nuclear weapons that no one has actually
witnessed in use -- not a foreign army intent on plunder, slavery,
rape, and murder. Our common enemies are harder to personify,
more difficult to hate than a Shahanshah, a Khan, or a
Führer.
And joining forces against these new enemies requires us to
make courageous efforts at self-knowledge, because we ourselves --
all the nations of the Earth, but especially the United States
and the Soviet Union -- bear responsibility for the perils we
now face.

Our two nations are tapestries woven from a rich diversity of
ethnic and cultural threads.
Militarily, we are the most powerful nations on Earth.
We are advocates of the proposition that science and technology
can make a better life for all.
We share a stated belief in the right of the people to rule
themselves.
Our systems of government were born in historic revolutions
against injustice, despotism, incompetence, and superstition.
We come from revolutionaries who accomplished the impossible --
freeing us from tyrannies entrenched for centuries and thought
to be divinely ordained.
What will it take to free us from the trap we have set for
ourselves?

Each side has a long list of deeply resented abuses committed
by the other -- some imaginary, most, in varying degrees, real.
Every time there is an abuse by one side, you can be sure of
some compensatory abuse by the other.
Both nations are full of wounded pride and professed moral
rectitude. Each knows in excruciating detail the most minor
malefactions of the other but hardly even glimpses its own sins
and the suffering its own policies have caused.
On each side, of course, there are good and honest people who
see the dangers their national policies have created -- people
who long, as a matter of elementary decency and simple survival,
to put things right.
But there are also, on both sides, people gripped by a hatred
and fear intentionally fanned by the respective agencies of
national propaganda, people who believe their adversaries are
beyond redemption, people who seek confrontation.
The hard-liners on each side encourage one another. They owe
their credibility and their power to one another. They need
one another. They are locked in a deadly embrace.

If no one else, alien or human, can extricate us from this
deadly embrace, then there is only one remaining alternative:
However painful it may be, we will just have to do it
ourselves.
A good start is to examine the historical facts as they might
be viewed by the other side -- or by posterity, if any.
Imagine first a Soviet observer considering some of the events
of American history:
The United States, founded on principles of freedom and liberty,
was the last major nation to end chattel slavery;
many of its founding fathers -- George Washington and Thomas
Jefferson among them -- were slave owners;
and racism was legally protected for a century after the slaves
were freed.
The United States has systematically violated more than 300
treaties it signed guaranteeing some of the rights of the
original inhabitants of the country.
In 1899, two years before becoming President, Theodore Roosevelt,
in a widely admired speech, advocated "righteous war" as the
sole means of achieving "national greatness."
The United States invaded the Soviet Union in 1918 in an
unsuccessful attempt to undo the Bolshevik Revolution.
The United States invented nuclear weapons and was the first
and only nation to explode them against civilian populations --
killing hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children in
the process.
The United States had operational plans for the nuclear
annihilation of the Soviet Union before there even was a Soviet
nuclear weapon, and it has been the chief innovator in the
continuing nuclear arms race.
The many recent contradictions between theory and practice in
the United States include the present [Reagan] Administration,
in high moral dudgeon, warning its allies not to sell arms to
terrorist Iran while secretly doing just that;
conducting worldwide covert wars in the name of democracy
while opposing effective economic sanctions against a South
African regime in which the vast majority of citizens have
no political rights at all;
being outraged at Iranian mining of the Persian Gulf as a
violation of international law, while it has itself mined
Nicaraguan harbors and subsequently fled from the jurisdiction
of the World Court;
vilifying Libya for killing children and in retaliation killing
children;
and denouncing the treatment of minorities in the Soviet Union,
while America has more young black men in jail than in college.
This is not just a matter of mean-spirited Soviet propaganda.
Even people congenially disposed toward the United States may
feel grave reservations about its real intentions, especially
when Americans are reluctant to acknowledge the uncomfortable
facts of their history.

Now imagine a Western observer considering some of the events
in Soviet history. Marshal Tukhachevsky's marching orders on
July 2, 1920, were, "On our bayonets we will bring peace and
happiness to toiling humanity. Forward to the West!"
Shortly after V.I. Lenin, in conversation with French delegates,
remarked: "Yes, Soviet troops are in Warsaw. Soon Germany will
be ours. We will reconquer Hungary. The Balkans will rise
against capitalism. Italy will tremble. Bourgeois Europe is
cracking at all its seams in this storm."
Then contemplate the millions of Soviet citizens killed by
Stalin's deliberate policy in the years between 1929 and World
War II -- in forced collectivization, mass deportation of
peasants, the resulting famine of 1932-33, and the great purges
(in which almost the entire Communist Party hierarchy over the
age of 35 was arrested and executed, and during which a new
constitution that allegedly safeguarded the rights of Soviet
citizens was proudly proclaimed).
Then consider Stalin's decapitation of the Red Army, the secret
protocol to his nonaggression pact with Hitler, and his refusal
to believe in a Nazi invasion of the USSR even after it had
begun -- and how many millions more were killed in consequence.
Think of Soviet restrictions on civil liberties, freedom of
expression, and the right to emigrate, and continuing endemic
anti-Semitism and religious persecution.
If, then, shortly after your nation is established, your
highest military and civilian leaders boast about their
intentions of invading neighboring states; if your absolute
leader for almost half your history is someone who methodically
killed millions of his own people;
if, even now, your coins display your national symbol emblazoned
over the whole world -- you can understand that citizens of
other nations, even those with peaceful or credulous dispositions,
may be skeptical of your present good intentions, however sincere
and genuine they might be.
This is not merely a matter of mean-spirited American propaganda.
The problem is compounded if you pretend such things never
happened.

"No nation can be free if it oppresses other nations," wrote
Friedrich Engels. At the London conference of 1903, Lenin
advocated the "complete right of self-determination of all
nations." The same principles were uttered in almost exactly
the same language by Woodrow Wilson and by many other American
statesmen.
But for both nations the facts speak otherwise.
The Soviet Union has forcibly annexed Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia,
and parts of Finland, Poland, and Romania;
occupied and brought under Communist control Poland, Romania,
Hungary, Mongolia, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany,
and Afghanistan;
and suppressed the East German workers' uprising of 1953,
the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the Czech attempt to introduce
glasnost and perestroika in 1968.
Excluding World Wars and expeditions to suppress piracy or the
slave trade, the United States has made armed invasions ind
interventions in other countries on more that 130 separate
occasions, including China (on 18 separate occasions),
Mexico (13), Nicaragua and Panama (9 each), Honduras (7),
Colombia and Turkey (6 each), the Dominican Republic, Korea,
and Japan (5 each), Argentina, Cuba, Haiti, the Kingdom of
Hawaii, and Samoa (4 each), Uruguay and Fiji (3 each), Guatemala,
Lebanon, the Soviet Union and Sumatra (2 each), Grenada,
Puerto Rico, Brazil, Chile, Morocco, Egypt, Ivory Coast, Syria,
Iraq, Peru, Formosa, the Philippines, Cambodia, Laos, and
Vietnam
[the list is based on compilations by the House Armed
Services Committee].
Most of these incursions were small-scale efforts to maintain
compliant governments or to protect American property and
business interests; but some were much larger, more prolonged,
and on far deadlier scales.

United States armed forces were intervening in Latin America
not only before the Bolshevik Revolution but also before the
Communist Manifesto -- which makes the
anti-Communism justification for American intervention in
Nicaragua a little difficult to rationalize;
the deficiencies of the argument would be better understood,
however, had the Soviet Union not been in the habit of
gobbling up other countries.
The American invasion of Southeast Asia -- of nations that
never had harmed or threatened the United States -- killed
58,000 Americans and more than a million Asians;
the U.S. dropped 7.5 megatons of high explosives and produced
an ecological and economic chaos from which the region still
has not recovered.
More that 100,000 Soviet troops have, since 1979, been occupying
Afghanistan -- a nation with lower per capita income than
Haiti -- with atrocities still largely untold (because Soviets
are much more successful than Americans in excluding independent
reporters from their war zones).

Habitual enmity is corrupting and self-sustaining.
If it falters, it can easily be revived by reminding us of
past abuses, by contriving an atrocity or a military incident,
by announcing that the adversary has deployed some dangerous
new weapon, ore merely by taunts of naïveté or
disloyalty when domestic political opinion becomes
uncomfortably evenhanded.
For many Americans, communism means poverty, backwardness,
the Gulag for speaking one's mind, a ruthless crushing of the
human spirit, and a thirst to conquer the world.
For many Soviets, capitalism means heartless and insatiable
greed, racism, war, economic instability, and a worldwide
conspiracy of the rich against the poor.
These are caricatures -- but not wholly so -- and over the
years Soviet and American actions have given them some
credence and plausibility.

These caricatures persist because they are partly true, but
also because they are useful. If there is an implacable enemy,
then bureaucrats have a ready excuse for why prices go up,
why consumer goods are unavailable, why the nation is
noncompetitive in world markets, why there are large numbers
of unemployed and homeless people, or why criticism of leaders
is unpatriotic an impermissible -- and especially why so
supreme an evil as nuclear weapons must be deployed in the
tens of thousands.
But if the adversary is insufficiently wicked, the incompetence
and failed vision of government officials cannot be so easily
ignored. Bureaucrats have motives for inventing enemies and
exaggerating their misdeeds.

Each nation has military and intelligence establishments that
evaluate the danger posed by the other side. These establishments
have a vested interest in large military and intelligence
expenditures. Thus, they must grapple with a continuing crisis
of conscience -- the clear incentive to exaggerate the adversary's
capabilities and intentions. When they succumb, they call it
necessary prudence; but whatever they call it, it propels the
arms race.
Is there an independent public assessment of the intelligence
data? No. Why not? Because the data are secret. So we have a
machine that goes by itself, a kind of de facto conspiracy to
prevent tensions from falling below a minimum level of
bureaucratic acceptability.

It is evident that many national institutions and dogmas,
however effective they may once have been, are now in need of
change. No nation is yet well-fitted to the world of the
twenty-first century. The challenge then is not in selective
glorification of the past, of in defending national icons,
but in devising a path that will carry us through a time of
great mutual peril.
To accomplish this, we need all the help we can get.

A central lesson of science is that to understand complex
issues (or even simple ones), we must try to free our minds
of dogma and to guarantee the freedom to publish, to contradict,
and to experiment. Arguments from authority are unacceptable.
We are all fallible, even leaders. But however clear it is that
criticism is necessary for progress, governments tend to resist.
The ultimate example is Hitler's Germany. Here is an excerpt
from a speech by the Nazi Party leader Rudolf Hess on June 30,
1934:
"One man remains beyond all criticism, and that is the
Führer. This is because everyone senses and knows:
He is always right, and he will always be right. The National
Socialism of all of us in anchored in uncritical loyalty, in
a surrender to the Führer."

The convenience of such a doctrine for national leaders is
further clarified by Hitler's remark: "What good fortune for
those in power that people do not think!"
Widespread intellectual and moral docility may be convenient
for leaders in the short term, but it is suicidal for nations
in the long term. One of the criteria for national leadership
should therefore be a talent for understanding, encouraging,
and making constructive use of vigorous criticism.

So when those who once were silenced and humiliated by state
terror now are able to speak out -- fledging civil libertarians
flexing their wings -- of course they find it exhilarating,
and so does any lover of freedom who witnesses it.
Glasnost and perestroika exhibit
to the rest of the world the human scope of the Soviet society
that past policies have masked. They provide error-correcting
mechanisms at all levels of Soviet society. They are essential
for economic well-being. They permit real improvements in
international cooperation and a major reversal of the nuclear
arms race. Glasnost and perestroika
are thus good for the Soviet Union and good for the United
States.

There is, of course, opposition to glasnost and
perestroika in the Soviet Union: by those who
must now demonstrate their abilities competitively rather
than sleepwalking through lifetime tenure;
by those unaccustomed to the responsibilities of democracy;
by those in no mood, after decades of following the norms,
to be taken to task for past behavior.
And in the United States too, there are those who oppose
glasnost and perestroika:
Some argue it is a trick to lull the West, while the Soviet
Union gathers its strength to emerge as a still more
formidable rival.
Some prefer the old kind of Soviet Union -- debilitated by
its lack of democracy, easily demonized, readily caricatured.
(Americans, complacent about their own democratic forms too
long, have something to learn from glasnost and
perestroika as well. This by itself makes some
Americans uneasy.)
With such powerful forces arrayed for and against reform,
no one can know the outcome.

I both countries, what passes for public debate is still,
on closer examination, mainly repetition of national slogans,
appeal to popular prejudice, innuendo, self-justification,
misdirection, incantation of homilies when evidence is asked
for, and a thorough contempt for the intelligence of the
citizenry.
What we need is an admission of how little we actually know
about how to pass safely through the next few decades,
the courage to examine a wide range of alternative programs,
and, most of all, a dedication not to dogma but to solutions.
Finding any solution will be hard enough. Finding ones that
perfectly correspond to eighteenth- or nineteenth-century
political doctrines will be much more difficult.

Our two nations must help one another figure out what changes
must be made; the changes must help both sides; and our
perspective must embrace a future beyond the next Presidential
term of office or the next Five Year Plan.
We need to reduce military budgets; raise living standards;
engender respect for learning; support science, scholarship,
invention, and industry; promote free inquiry; reduce
domestic coercion; involve the workers more in managerial
decisions; and promote a genuine respect and understanding
derived from an acknowledgment of our common humanity and our
common jeopardy.

Although we must cooperate to an unprecedented degree, I am
not arguing against healthy competition. But let us compete
in finding ways to reverse the nuclear arms race and to make
massive reductions in conventional forces;
in eliminating government corruption;
in making most of the world agriculturally self-sufficient.
Let us vie in art and science, in music and literature, in
technological innovation.
Let us have a honesty race.
Let us compete in relieving suffering and ignorance and
disease; in respecting national independence worldwide;
in formulating and implementing an ethic for responsible
stewardship of the planet.

Let us learn from one another. Capitalism and socialism have
been mutually borrowing methods and doctrine in largely
unacknowledged plagiarisms for a century.
Neither the US nor the Soviet Union has a monopoly on truth
and virtue.
I wold like to see us compete in cooperativeness.
In the 1970s, apart from treaties constraining the nuclear arms
race, we had some notable successes in working together --
the elimination of smallpox worldwide, efforts to prevent
South African nuclear weapons development, the
Apollo-Soyuz joint manned spaceflight.
We can do much better. Let us begin with a few joint projects
of great scope and vision -- in relief of starvation, especially
in nations such as Ethiopia, which are victimized by superpower
rivalry; in identifying and defusing long-term environmental
catastrophes that are products of our technology; in fusion
physics to provide a safe energy source for the future; in
joint exploration of Mars, culminating in the first landing of
human beings -- Soviets and Americans -- on another planet.

Perhaps we will destroy ourselves. Perhaps the common enemy
within us will be too strong for us to recognize and overcome.
Perhaps the world will be reduced to medieval conditions or
far worse.

But I have hope. Lately there are signs of change -- tentative
but in the right direction and, by previous standards of national
behavior, swift. Is it possible that we -- we
Americans, we Soviets, we humans -- are at
last coming to our senses and beginning to work together on
behalf of the species and the planet?

Nothing is promised. History has placed this burden on our
shoulders. It is up to us to build a future worthy of our children
and grandchildren.